Can Presbyterians Be High-Church?
But perhaps either turning to other traditions wholesale or supplementing Presbyterian devotion with Anglican and Orthodox forms is unnecessary. Maybe there is buried within the historical mass of low-church Presbyterianism a high-church tradition every bit as divinely appointed and liturgically well conceived as the best of the other traditions higher up the scale. If so, then low-church Presbyterianism is the real oxymoron. Many Christians might be surprised by the high-church tendencies within the Reformed tradition, Presbyterians perhaps being the most amazed. So accustomed are Protestants in North America to remembering the anti-papist sentiments of the Reformation that they forget how many of the practices and beliefs of Christendom were perpetuated in Calvinistic and Lutheran churches, chief among them a respect for ritual, formality, and holy office. The Protestant Reformation, after all, was just that, a reformation of forms and structures, not a repudiation of ritual or legit
